ED-71, a new active vitamin D3, increases bone mineral density regardless of serum 25(OH)D levels in osteoporotic subjects.

A previous randomized placebo-controlled double-blinded clinical trial revealed that treatment of osteoporotic subjects supplemented with 200 or 400IU/day vitamin D3 with 0.75 microg/day ED-71 for 12 months increased lumbar and hip bone mineral density (BMD) by 3.4 and 1.5%, respectively, compared to placebo group (JCE&M 90:5031,2005). These effects on BMD were stronger than any previous results using 1alpha(OH)D3 or 1,25(OH)2D3. However, there still was a concern that the effect of ED-71 could be observed because serum 25(OH)D in many of these subjects were below its optimal level. In order to address this issue, we performed post hoc analysis to compare the effect of ED-71 on lumbar and hip BMD between subjects with upper (>29 ng/mL) and lower tertiles (<25 ng/mL) of serum 25(OH)D. Lumbar BMD after 12-month treatment with 0.5, 0.75 and 1.0 microg/day ED-71 increased similarly in both lower and upper tertile groups of serum 25(OH)D. In addition, hip BMD also showed a tendency to increase when 0.75 and 1.0 microg/day ED-71 groups were combined together in both upper and lower serum 25(OH)D tertile groups, although the increase was not statistically significant. These results demonstrate that the effect of ED-71 on bone is independent of supplementary effect for nutritional vitamin D insufficiency, and suggest that ED-71 may exert its effect as a unique VDR ligand with stronger effect on bone compared to the natural ligand, 1,25(OH)2D3.